[OS X TeX] microtype

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 09.08.2010 um 19:06 schrieb George Gratzer:

> Would these contribute to speeder typesettings with microtype?

I doubt it. TeX is not multi-threaded. You could reduce some  
unnecessary effort by switching off any synching between source and  
PDF output.

You could also think of TeXing chapter after chapter and then finally  
putting all chapters together with another pdfTeX run on a source file  
which just stitches the PDFs together... (you certainly know how to  
set the page number of the new chapter and the pdfpages package) Here,  
in this multi-job situation, you could start with 'make -j 24' (that's  
the number all hyper-threading virtual cores of the Xeons) and a  
Makefile which describes that the final book depends on the many  
chapters TeX'ed before the final run and how to pdftex the individual  
chapters to the final book.

Besides this you would ruin your shiny SSD. The memory cells inside  
the device allow only a few thousand, maybe a few ten thousand re- 
writes. Then they're depleted, the "disk controller" has to mark the  
sectors as unusable, the capacity of the SSD will be reduced. Using an  
SSD is as clever as using a Porsche instead of a Volkswagen, which  
runs, and runs, and runs, and runs. Really clever is to install the  
maximum 16 GB of RAM (I think 8 GB should suffice) and at least one  
SSD (with two SSDs you could create a RAID0 with twice the bandwidth)  
and use some amount of the RAM as RAM disk volumes (which are very  
fast, always, and don't degrade). Here, in this *volatile* RAM disks  
(each volume for a particular use) you can pdftex lightning fast.  
Without ruining your SSD. You just have to remember to copy the final  
product(s) to safe disk – which the Makefile might achieve as very  
last step as well. (Actually Spotlight could save it directly on an  
external disk.)

--
Greetings

   Pete

Upgraded, adj.:
	Didn't work the first time.